It is well known that heavy oil and/or bitumen are difficult to transport from their production areas due to their high viscosities at typical handling temperatures. On the other hand, light oils generally have much lower viscosity values and therefore flow more easily through pipelines. Regardless of the recovery method used for their extraction, heavy oil and/or bitumen generally need to be diluted by blending the heavy oil and/or bitumen with at least one low density and low viscosity diluent to make the heavy oil and/or bitumen transportable, in particular over long distances. The diluents used are typically gas condensate, naphtha, lighter oil, or a combination of any of the three. For example in Canada, when making transportable oil and using gas condensate as a diluent, the volume of gas condensate added to the bitumen is typically 30 to 35% of the total product.
There are several disadvantages of adding diluent to heavy oil and/or bitumen to produce transportable oil including:                Well remoteness makes the construction of pipelines for sending or returning the diluents to the heavy hydrocarbon production zone considerably expensive; and        Availability of diluents, typically light hydrocarbons, such as gas condensates, is steadily decreasing worldwide, making them more expensive to procure.        
Chemical processing has become an attractive alternative for converting heavy oil and/or bitumen into transportable oil, and in some cases chemical processing is the only viable alternative for transporting heavy oil and/or bitumen to refineries and market places.
Most chemical processes for converting heavy oil and/or bitumen into transportable oil are thermal cracking based systems. Thermal cracking based systems range from moderate thermal cracking such as visbreaking to more severe thermal cracking such as coking systems. These processes are generally applied to the heaviest hydrocarbons in the heavy oil and/or bitumen, typically the fraction called the vacuum residue (“VR”) which contains a high concentration of asphaltenes.
One disadvantage of the above chemical processes is the limited conversion of heavy hydrocarbons into lighter hydrocarbons due to the generation and instability of asphaltenes during these processes. These processes reduce the stability of the heavy oil due to the disruption of the asphaltenes-resins interactions. This instability increases with increased conversion levels, resulting in the precipitation of asphaltenes and the formation of problematic deposits in equipment and pipes.
In coking systems, asphaltenes are converted into coke which requires the addition of complex and expensive equipment to deal with the coke.
Another disadvantage of the above chemical processes is the production of cracked material by-products (e.g. olefins and di-olefins). If left untreated, olefins and di-olefins may react with oxygen (such as oxygen in the air) or other reactive compounds (e.g. organic acids, carbonyls, amines, etc.) to form long chain polymers, commonly referred to as gums, which further foul downstream process equipment. To reduce the olefins and di-olefins in the final product, expensive hydro-processing and hydrogen generation infrastructures must be used to treat the cracked material.
The disadvantages described above translate into significant cost and complexity, rendering small scale applications of these technologies uneconomical. In Long Lake, Alberta, Canada, Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (“SAGD”) technology is used to recover bitumen. The bitumen is mixed with a light hydrocarbon as a diluent, which dilutes the thick bitumen and enables it to flow (“DilBit”). The DilBit is then upgraded into premium crude oil at the onsite upgrader using a paraffinic solvent de-asphalting (“SDA”) unit, followed by thermal cracking and hydrocracking technologies. The bitumen is upgraded into 40 API synthetic oil and the rejected asphaltenes are fed into a gasifier to generate the hydrogen for hydrocracking as well as the energy required to extract the bitumen from the reservoir. Such complexity is typical of current technological state-of-the-art processes in bitumen recovery and treatment.
Several patents have been published which discuss attempts to address these problems (U.S. Pat. No. 7,981,277, U.S. Pat. No. 4,443,328, US2009/0200209, CA2232929, CA2217300, and CA2773000). Each of these references, however, suffer from one or more of the following disadvantages:                The simultaneous removal of water and asphaltenes is not contemplated, resulting in the asphaltenes causing equipment plugging issues as discussed above;        There is no water in the asphaltenes feed so more valuable lighter hydrocarbons must be precipitated with the asphaltenes to act as a viscosity-reducing diluent. This substantially reduces recovery which lowers profit;        Only applicable to mine applications;        Overcracking of the bitumen in the upright cylindrical reactor (U.S. Pat. No. 4,443,328) is not addressed; and        Production of olefins and di-olefins in the thermally cracked material is not addressed.        
There is a need for improved heavy oil and/or bitumen recovery and upgrading processes.